Minecraft Forums

I think the armadillos are cute.

In all seriousness though, this update actually makes a ton of background changes that are good for the game. It pretty much rewrote how most block and entity properties in the game are stored and processed.

After a long time, it's about time I made some kind of update to the original post. It's not flashy like it used to be, but it will do for now. There's a link to our discord server there.

The Minecraft forums used to have a link to it on the really old Minecraft launcher (how many launchers have there been now? 5?) and because of that the forums used to get much more traffic. Things started to dwindle when the forum link was removed from the launcher. I think the main point where I noticed the forums being less active was after 1.4 released.

I still like coming here to discuss the future versions and snapshots. It's fun to see what others think of new features.

If the swamp features are anything to go by: this is the update the losing biome votes get in. That means we might get the badlands, savanna, and desert changes that were mentioned in the previous contests might get in this update.

While it's saddening to see the deep dark get delayed again I am intrigued by how much they have expanded on it. Looks like it's no longer a biome but rather some kind of generated structure(s). In the first preview of the deepdark we saw the darkness effect just sorta happen on its own (perhaps caused by the biome). Now that darkness effect is caused by the skulk screamer. The warden also seems to spawn by emerging out of the skulk SPC-106 style as opposed to just kinda being there. I was looking forward to encountering the warden sooner but I guess I will have to wait even more. However I will definitely be playing 1.18 when it comes out.

I'm also excited to see those swamp updates. Looks like they expanded upon the old biome voter idea. However with the name of the Wild Update it seems kinda small to just update the swamp. Maybe the badlands, desert and savanna will also get updated in 1.19. Now that would be a WILD update.

I bet they won't add the deep dark until the near end.

Cave entrances are nice but bear in mind that in the past there were times where you couldn't build in some areas (without major landscaping efforts) because the surface was covered in cave entrances. A little more would be nice. Most entrances should be small which would lead to the big caves. I've seen some cave entrances that look like enormous sinkholes or craters and I would not want those to be more common.

This video is very interesting. Watched it all the way through. 5 different noise maps all working together to give us this new terrain. Looks like they're really trying to nail down the micro biome issue. I'd say that it's pretty good now but completely getting rid of them may or may not happen. I look forward to making a new world in 1.18. I decided to skip over 1.17 so that I would get the full caves and cliffs experience as initially intended.

Apparently is wasn't that they were unfinished but that there would be a parity issue between Java and Bedrock as Bedrock didn't have them yet.

I feel like I won't do a survival world for this update, but I'll definitely play around with creative mode and make some interesting builds with the new blocks.

The copper and iron veins are way more impressive than I thought they would be. Given copper's and iron's usefulness in large scale building projects they will definitely be something nice to find. Now mining these things up is going to be a whole other endeavor but interesting to conquer.

While it's a bit disheartening that we won't be seeing the crazy stuff in the next update is nice to see that they really want this update to live up to its expectations. The last thing we need is another performance disaster like 1.3 or 1.6.

Quote from The_Shadow»

A rather disappointing snapshot after a week away. I hope the new biomes start generating soon.

We have the biome in the buffet mode. Odds are the deep dark will get this treatment as well. It's likely so that they can test how the biome generates without needing to find them with the find biome command. After that we'll get cave biomes to generate in normal worlds. However I'm willing to bet that the deep dark will be the last thing added in the game. The road map might go like this:

Current snapshot: Cave biomes generate in normal worlds -> Mountain changes begin to be added to Java Edition Snapshots -> Archeology added (honestly this is the wild card and could be added at any point) -> Deep dark added -> Warden added -> Bug fix phase -> pre-release -> 1.17 goes live.

The mountain changes look really cool. It looks like the Bedrock team is focusing on the mountains while the Java team is focusing on the caves. Maybe they'll do a merge at some point which will be huge for both versions. Either that or both versions are going to need to play catch up with each other. That aside it is very wise for them to take this direction. It allows both sides of the update to be visualized and tested at the same time while focusing resources on each feature. Makes me wonder if bedrock will see archeology before java does.

The problem with that is potential old world compatibility issues. I personally think it's really cool we're getting -Y values. Makes seem like you're going somewhere you're not supposed to.

Quote from TheMasterCaver»

I doubt that caving will actually be more effective than branch-mining, at least for diamond; even with the massive caves in TMCW, which are much larger than anything in 1.17 (not that I've seen much, but I've seen a chart that shows that the "giant" caves barely take up much of the underground and it doesn't really look like caves are more common in general, especially not like the "Swiss cheese" in 1.6.4/TMCW), I don't find ores any faster than I do in vanilla 1.6.4, and actually, slightly slower, partly due to the much higher mob density but also because of the much greater effort spent on lighting up caves (compared to my first world I used about 50% more torches per chunk but averaged about the same amount of ore per chunk):

Branch-mining is also far safer, I wouldn't dare try exploring any of the huge caves in TMCW without full gear; I've killed upwards of 600 mobs while lighting up a single cave because mobs can continuously respawn in unlit areas and immediately pathfind to you (usually, this means rushing in to place a few torches before retreating to kill off a wave of mobs, then repeat). Of course, 1.17 is apparently adding a mob that can two-shot a player in full netherite, which if true is ridiculous and you may as well not even bother with "armor" (hasn't it already been nerfed enough? Yes, I nerfed it myself in TMCW, even amethyst only reduces damage by 66.7%, but aside from the usual sources (magic, falling, etc) only axes penetrate armor and there are no stronger mobs than what vanilla already has, and actually, creepers only deal 36 instead of 49 damage point-blank, if with the ability to keep moving during their countdown).

Also, based on the chart of ore distribution that I've seen, there appears to be no coal in the deeper layers, which will severely hamper caving; I use around a thousand torches per play session, far more than I used in a similar amount of time spent branch-mining, and based on my experience with my own mods that made the underground deeper* you can spend a long time within a relatively small altitude range, I remember spending days only finding coal and iron in TripleHeightTerrain as I gradually explored a single cave system from the surface down, with a per-chunk cave volume of about 4 times higher than vanilla 1.6.4 (my own mod simply stretched the ranges of ores; e.g. for a sea level of 191 iron generated across 3x the range, and so on, except for rarer ores, which were relative to the amounts exposed in caves, where layers 10-15 in vanilla are equivalent to 4 layers at the peak concentration).

A few night vision potions and an enchanted crossbow will make things easy enough. Shafting is boring and is only done out of necessity. Conquering a cave is much more fun even if it grants less rewards. It's just that caving will be a tad more rewarding.